[THS] Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Taking Down America

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

December 5, 2010
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Taking Down America
Tomgramdispatch.com

Trying to play down the significance of an ongoing Wikileaks dump of more than
250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently
offered the following bit of Washington wisdom: “The fact is, governments deal with
the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because
they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets... [S]ome
governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most
because they need us.  We are still essentially, as has been said before, the
indispensable nation.”

Now, wisdom like that certainly sounds sober; it’s definitely what passes for
hardheaded geopolitical realism in our nation’s capital; and it's true, Gates is not the
first top American official to call the U.S. “the indispensable nation”; nor do I doubt
that he and many other inside-the-Beltway players are convinced of our global
indispensability.  The problem is that the news has almost weekly been undermining
his version of realism, making it look ever more phantasmagorical.  The ability of
Wikileaks, a tiny organization of activists, to thumb its cyber-nose at the global
superpower, repeatedly shining a blaze of illumination on the penumbra of secrecy
under which its political and military elite like to conduct their affairs, hasn’t helped
one bit either.  If our indispensability is, as yet, hardly questioned in Washington,
elsewhere on the planet it’s another matter.

The once shiny badge of the “global sheriff” has lost its gleam and, in Dodge City,
ever fewer are paying the sort of attention that Washington believes is its due.  To
my mind, the single most intelligent comment on the latest Wikileaks uproar comes
from Simon Jenkins of the British Guardian who, on making his way through the
various revelations (not to speak of the mounds of global gossip), summed matters
up this way: “The money-wasting is staggering. [U.S.] Aid payments are never
followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world's
superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran,
Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off
script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power
projection unproductive.”

Sometimes, to understand just where you are in the present, it helps to peer into the
past -- in this case, into what happened to previous “indispensable” imperial powers;
sometimes, it’s no less useful to peer into the future.  In his latest TomDispatch post,
Alfred W. McCoy, author most recently of Policing America’s Empire: The United
States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, does both.  Having
convened a global working group of 140 historians to consider the fate of the U.S. as
an imperial power, he offers us a glimpse of four possible American (near-)futures.
They add up to a monumental, even indispensable look at just how fast our
indispensability is likely to unravel in the years to come.  Tom